Other People’s Children: Feeling the True Romance

Rachel is 40 years old, with no children. She loves her life: her high school students, her friends, her ex, her guitar lessons. When she falls in love with Ali, she becomes attached to Leila, his 4-year-old daughter. She tucks her into bed, cares for her, loves her like her own. But to love other people’s children is risky.Content collapsed.

REVIEW:

When Rachel (Virginie Efira), a Parisian school teacher, falls in love with a divorced car designer, she falls in love with his school age little girl also. Virginie has a face that just glows in love. Match that with her natural, charming beauty, a winning smile and an effortless and graceful stride and she’s the epitome of grateful amor. She’s almost a bourgeois fairy tale princess experiencing the ideal life she imagines exist beyond her imprisoning castle.

Rachel has a full life, with true nurturing supporting friends and family. She not looking for a man to complete her or deliver a fairy tale ending. Yet, the director and screenwriter Rebecca Zlotowski will give her one Ali (Roschdy Zem), albeit one with divorce baggage, and a child-Leila (Callie Ferreira Goncalves), a radiant bit of sunshine that could easily been the main lead in Francois Truffaut’s gloss on childhood, Small Change.

Their relationship feels lived-in and comfortable and full of cheerful ambiance. This being a French romance there is a casual embrace of nudity, and sex that is joyous, natural, freeing and transformative.

Still, the other aspects of Rachel’s life are not shunt aside. She’s in love , yet alive to the love others and the world has to offer. The ripples effects good and bad are forever being shown. Zlotowski delights in showing the full Rachel.

This is real life and obligations and expectations will prevent a happy ever after. In a bit of amusing casting, the great documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman turns up as the slightly sour reality note. Wiseman plays Rachel’s gynecologist who reminds her that her maternal hopes have a short time stamp and that relationships and life can be fickle. It adds the proper real counterbalance to the romantic thoughts rushing around in Rachel’s head.

Zlotowski emphasizes her alignment with Rachel with punctuating iris shots and scenes with two characters in separate locations directly facing the character. Zlotowski is so good at depicting the romance in a vivid and natural way that these other intrusions can go by barely noticed. The end is well set up but still feels surprising and somewhat shocking. Zlotowski may be bubble making, but she herself is never fully inside them. She’s telling a romance with some bruises in perception, about the messiness of modern life and love, about people who must exist in reality and not fantasy.

Yet, Zlotowski is compassionate enough to give Rachel an epilogue that gathers together the disparate charming and aching elements of her story- a song, a tantrum, an illness, a misunderstood boy, a traumatic childhood accident- into an ending that rewards not only surviving but doing it well enough to be thanked by life and others.